I've said before how much I enjoy the "Tavern Quest" games run by Omen Star. It's the most marvellous lightweight lockdown experience of mutually agreed storytelling, based on some sketchy tropes nailed together with so much plagiarism that it counts as research. Your characters meet up the night before some momentous event, and play what... Continue Reading →
Playing with food: Meet at the Graveyard
Last night was "Meet at the Graveyard" an online roleplay thingy from Omen Star, held over Discord video call. The character brief had Caprizant the Hungry Ghoul as a chef who seasons with extracted emotions, rather than some beast who eats the dead. "You distil the fear, the hopelessness and the despair into a fine... Continue Reading →
Designing for competence (Designers’ hour, Knutepunkt 2021)
Kat Quatermass spotted that Søren Lyng Ebbehøj was looking for speakers who'd thought about designing for competence at Knutepunkt this year. The Wing and a Prayer team certainly had. I couldn't be there in person, but wrote a script and made a quick recording of it. Søren was kind enough to accept it... This was... Continue Reading →
Time-tax: a guest post by Andy Raff
Never, ever, time tax your players, says Andy Raff, and good advice it is.
Access and Lessons in Medieval Combat: a guest post by Tim Baker.
Tim Baker writes "This article came about because of the worries expressed by a friend about learning to fight, due to accessibility issues, then wondering both what advice I could offer and how I could adjust my own teaching. For anyone who does not want to read the whole thing for my conclusions, the short version is: communication is powerful and respect each other."
Where interests collide: Empire and food.
This is a bit of musing that Andy Raff did way back when for the Empire fest game. It didn't make the cut to get onto the wik; let's face it, the Empire wiki is quite big enough without a page on food. I extended it a bit with some more foodie bits, and I'm... Continue Reading →
Games-within-games: a guest post by Nick Bradbeer
Nick Bradbeer was on the team for both runs of Allied Games' "Wing and a Prayer", and if he didn't coin the term "tasklarp" he was there or thereabouts when it was first used. (I'm pretty sure it was pre-dated by Lauren Owen using the phrase "joblarp", for what it's worth.) This is a Facebook... Continue Reading →
20th Century Fae: memory magic and its modern consequences
I like to try and aim for "what you see is what you get" in the larps I'm involved with. I'd prefer to use something to represent itself, rather than be a comparatively poor quality representation of something else. This post looks at some of the video we used, and how I felt about it.... Continue Reading →
A Midwinter Night’s Dream
I really wasn't going to run a larp in 2020. I was going to play a lot of larp, learn a lot, then come back in 2021. Then came COVID, and lockdown, and no face-to-face larps at all after Avalon LARP Studios' "Midwinter". That was not quite sufficient for a year. I did a couple... Continue Reading →
Meet at the tavern: online roleplaying
It's a very familiar fantasy trope. There's an isolated tavern in an isolated village and you're there to adventure. I think the first time I stepped in the door of somewhere like this, it was December 1979, the tavern was in a keep on the borderlands, and the point was we are all off to... Continue Reading →
